Poems — already — in the wake of Boston’s bombings

Poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Wordsworth once observed, but there’s no room yet for recollection – or anything like peace – in the short days since the Boston Marathon bombings.

And yet people are already writing poems. Google will guide you to a plethora, including a bunch of them collected here by writer Julie Glover. As she observes, April is National Poetry Month.

How such bits of verse rate in terms of poetic brilliance is a moot question: Poems like these serve their purpose in being written, not being read. Like the flowers and signs strewn across downtown Boston, they’re memorials. They function less as literature than proof, hastily composed and riddled with typos, that the urge to make art in the aftermath of tragedy is a deeply human impulse. It’s a way to make sense of senselessness, give form to chaos and put a few words to unspeakable pain.